Robert Jordan - The Fires of Heaven

Uno's real eye narrowed — she tried not to see the other — and after a moment he nodded. "I remember the face. I never forget a flaming pretty face. But the hair was bloody well different. Nyna?"

"Nynaeve," she told him sharply.

He shook his head, eyeing her up and down, and before she could say another word, he had seized her arm and was all but dragging her out through the entrance. The horse handlers there recognized her, of course, and the broken-nosed fellows started forward hefting their cudgels. She waved them away furiously even as she was yanking her arm free; it took three tries, and still it was more a matter of his letting go. The man had a grip like iron. The men with the clubs hesitated, then drifted back to their places when they saw Uno drop his grip. Apparently they knew what Valan Luca would prefer them to be guarding.

"What do you think you are doing?" she demanded, but Uno only motioned her to follow, watching to see that she did so without more than slowing his stride through the crowd waiting to get in. He had slightly bowed legs, and moved like a man more used to the back of a horse than his own feet. Growling to herself, she picked up her skirts and stalked after him toward the town.

Two other menageries were set up behind brown canvas walls not far off, and beyond them more lay scattered among the crowded shanty villages. None too close to the city walls, though. Apparently the governor, as they called the woman Nynaeve could have named mayor — though she had never heard of a woman mayor — had decreed half a mile as the distance, to protect the town in case any of the animals got loose.

The sign over the entrance to the nearest show said MAIRIN GOME in florid green and gold. Two women were clearly visible above the sign, clinging to a rope hanging from a tall framework of poles that had not been there when Luca's walls went up. Apparently the boar-horses' rearing high enough to be seen was having an effect. The women contorted themselves into positions that made Nynaeve think uncomfortably of what Moghedien had done, and somehow even managed to hold themselves out in horizontal handstands to either side of the rope. The crowd waiting impatiently in front of Mistress Gome's sign was almost as large as the one in front of Luca's. None of the other shows had anything visible that she could see, and their crowds were much smaller.

Uno refused to answer her questions or say a word or do more than give her dire frowns until they were out of the jam of people and onto a cart path of hard-packed dirt. "What I am flaming trying to do," he growled then, "is to take you where we can flaming well talk without you being torn to flaming bits by flaming folk trying to kiss your flaming hem when they find out you flaming know the Lord Dragon." There was no one within thirty paces of them, but he still stared around for anyone who might hear. "Blood and bloody ashes, woman! Don't you know what these flaming goat-heads are like? Half of them think the Creator talks to him over bloody supper every night, and the other half think he is the bloody Creator!"

"I will thank you to moderate your language, Master Uno. And I will thank you to slow down, too. We are not running a footrace. Where are you going, and why should I stir another step with you?"

He rolled his eye toward her, chuckling wryly. "Oh, I do remember you. The one with the fla— the mouth. Ragan thought you could skin and butcher a blo— a bull at ten paces with your tongue. Chaena and Nangu thought fifty." At least he did shorten his stride.

Nynaeve stopped dead. "Where and why?"

"Into the town." He did not stop. He strode right on, flipping a hand for her to follow. "I don't know what you're flam— what you're doing here, but I remember you were mixed up with that blue woman."

Snarling under her breath, she gathered her skirts and hurried after him again; it was the only way to hear. He continued as if she had been beside him the whole time. "This is no blood— no place for you to be. I can scrape together enough blo— aagh! — enough coin to get you to Tear, I think. Rumor says that's where the Lord Dragon is." Again he looked around warily. "Unless you want to go to the island instead." He must have meant Tar Valon. "There's blo— there's odd rumors floating around about that, too. Peace, if there aren't!" He came from a land that had not known peace in three thousand years; Shienarans used the word as talisman and oath both. "They say the old Amyrlin's been deposed. Executed maybe. Some say they fought — and burned the whole —" He paused, taking a deep breath and grimacing horribly. "the whole city."

Walking along, she studied him in amazement. She had not seen him in nearly a year, had never spoken more than two words together to him, and yet he… Why did men always think a woman needed a man to look after her? Men could not lace up their own shirts without a woman to help! "We are doing quite well as we are, thank you. Unless you know when a river trader will dock on his way downriver."

"We? Is the blue woman with you, or the brown?" That had to be Moiraine and Verin. He was certainly being cautious.

"No. Do you remember Elayne?" He gave a blunt nod, and a mischievous impulse seized her; nothing seemed to faze the man, and he obviously expected to just take charge of her welfare. "You saw her again just now. You said she had a" — she made her voice gruff in imitation of his — "face like a bloody queen."

He stumbled in a quite satisfactory way, and glared around him so fiercely that even two Whitecloaks riding by skirted wide around him, though they tried to pretend he had nothing to do with it, of course. "Her?" he growled incredulously. "But her bloody hair was black as a raven's…" He glanced at hers, and the next minute he was pacing up the cart path again, muttering half to himself, "The flaming woman is daughter to a queen. A bloody queen! Showing her bloody legs that way." Nynaeve nodded in agreement. Until he added, "You bloody southlanders are bloody strange! No flaming decency at all!" He had fine room to talk. Shienarans might dress properly, but she still blushed to remember that in Shienar men and women bathed together as often as not, and thought no more of it than of eating together.

"Did your mother never teach you to talk decently, man?" His real eye frowned at her almost as darkly as the painted one, and he rolled his shoulders. In Fal Dara he and everyone else had treated her as nobly born, or the next thing to. Of course, it was hard to pass herself off as a lady in that dress, and with her hair a shade that nature never made. She arranged her shawl more snugly and folded her arms to hold it in place. The gray wool was terribly uncomfortable in that dry heat, and she herself was not feeling very dry at all; she had never heard of anyone who died of sweating, but she thought she might well be the first. "What are you doing here, Uno?"

He looked around before answering. Not that he had need; there was little traffic on the path — an occasional ox-drawn cart, a few folk in farm clothes or rougher, here and there a man on a horse — and no one seemed willing to come any closer to him than they had to. He appeared a man who might cut somebody's throat on a whim. "The blue woman gave us a name in Jehannah, and said we were to wait there until she sent instructions, but the woman in Jehannah was dead and buried when we arrived. An old woman. Died in her sleep, and none of her relatives had ever heard the blue woman's name. Then Masema started talking to people, and… Well, there was no point staying there for orders we'd never hear if they did come. We stay close to Masema because he slips us enough to live on, though none except Bartu and Nengar listen to his trash." The grizzled topknot swung as he shook his head in irritation.

Suddenly Nynaeve realized that there had not been a single obscene word in that. He looked about to swallow his tongue. "Perhaps if you cursed only occasionally?" She sighed. "Maybe once every other sentence?" The man smiled at her so gratefully that she wanted to throw up her hands in exasperation. "How is it that Masema has money when the rest of you do not?" She remembered Masema: a dark sour man who liked no one and nothing.